Word: underclass
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lowest voter turnouts in the West. Everyone has his reasons: difficult voter-registration procedures, a large and apolitical underclass, a general contentment that makes people not even bother to vote. But there is another explanation: boredom. People are so disappointed with the nominees for President that they see no point in expending great effort to choose among them...
Over the past two decades, too many big-city public schools have degenerated into jungles of incompetence, failed objectives, even violent crime. A million U.S. high schoolers drop out annually, joining a swelling underclass of unemployables. In Los Angeles, only 229 youngsters of 1,918 at one typical school can read up to grade level. In New York City, classroom thugs committed 1,606 assaults on school grounds last year. A showcase failure among the wreckage has been Jersey City, an 86% minority system where only 25.9% of ninth-graders can pass standard proficiency exams...
...supplies them. Drug gangs would disappear as bootleggers did after the repeal of Prohibition; with them would go the current, pervasive corruption of police officers, lawyers, judges and politicians bribed by drug money. Drug dealing would no longer seem to be the only way out of the ghetto for underclass youths. Says Mayor Schmoke: "If you take the profit out of drug trafficking, you won't have young children hiding drugs ((on behalf of pushers)) for $100 a night or wearing beepers to school because it makes more sense to run drugs for someone than to take some...
Given that the underclass is over-whlemingly comprised of Blacks and Hispanics, it may at first seem suprising that Wilson opposes affirmative action. Wilson has two objections to racespecific policies. First, affirmative action programs in their different forms all tend to benefit the relatively well-off disproportianately. For inner-city Blacks without access to an appropriate job market, affirmative action is of little use. Secondly, race-specific policies are notoriously unpopular politically, especially in times when the economy suffers setbacks...
...both economic growth and a tight labor market" combined with fiscal and monetary policies designed to curb inflation. A tight labor market would raise wages and aid the truly disadvantaged disproportionately, as increased labor force participation rates for both Black men and Black women would go far in stabilizing underclass family and community structure...